BOARD SAYS IT WAS LEFT IN DARK ABOUT HEPATITIS : COUNTY SUPERVISORS DEMAND EXPLANATION FOR LATE NOTIFICATION.

Byline: Mary F. Pols Daily News Staff Writer

As a massive effort to inoculate schoolchildren who may have been infected with hepatitis A hits the homestretch today, the county Board of Supervisors plans to direct the Health Department to explain why it and other top officials were left out of the notification loop.

School and some health officials had known for four days about the possibility that nearly 9,000 students and staff members at 18 schools within the Los Angeles Unified School District had been served contaminated strawberries between March 25 and 28.

But the supervisors and Health Services Director Mark Finucane didn't learn about the crisis until mere minutes before the public was informed on April 1. The head of the Board of Supervisors, Zev Yaroslavsky, was indignant at what he called a ``communications breakdown.''

At the meeting today, Yaroslavsky plans to put forward a motion asking for a report from the health department assessing the cause of the lapse and establishing a protocol to keep the same thing from happening again. But he said he isn't interested in punishing anyone.

``I'm concerned about how long it took Mr. Finucane to learn about it from his subordinates,'' he said. ``Without passing judgment I want to make sure that there will be a timely communication to our health personnel about any problem that might arise. My whole point of this is not to point a finger of blame.''

Dr. Shirley Fannin, director of disease control for the county Health Department, said Monday that the board simply ``fell through the cracks.''

``There is no excuse,'' Fannin said. ``There are plenty of people here and the board could have been notified. I don't find any excuse for that. We'll just have to figure out a better way in the future.''

As for exposing Finucane to the embarrassment of not being able to answer the supervisors' questions about the contaminated fruit, Fannin said, ``We didn't serve him well.''

``You live and learn,'' she added.

On Monday, one or two students reportedly developed hepatitis A-like symptoms and were tested by the public health department, said Helen DuPlessis, the LAUSD's student medical services director. But she and Fannin both played down the possibility that those were actual cases of hepatitis A stemming from the bad strawberries.

``It is awfully early,'' Fannin said, noting that only in unusual cases do symptoms actually develop within two weeks of exposure and that typically hepatitis A incubates between three and six weeks. ``I would guess it is something else entirely.''

Meanwhile, 3,092 more students at four schools within the district were given shots of gamma globulin Monday to ward off outbreaks of hepatitis A. Today, nurses will visit the remaining three schools where the strawberries were served to inoculate students.

Then school officials will concentrate on ``catching the stragglers'' who missed the shots the first time around, DuPlessis said.

``There is going to be a nice chunk of stragglers,'' she said. ``There will be a handful at each school.''

Nurses visited John C. Fremont High School, James A. Garfield High School, Bell High School and Alta Loma elementary school to give shots to students Monday. Students at Trinity Street School, Virgil Middle School and Mount Vernon Middle School are scheduled for encounters with the needle today.